A. Victoria Mixon, Editor

Grammar Expose: Serial vs. Oxford Comma

Victoria — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 07:44:14 +0000

Last week we talked about the third-person singular pronoun.

So this week let’s stick with our grammar expose and tackle another question that I continue to be asked, even though the answer is simple and has been established for a very, very long time:

Serial vs. Oxford comma

Luckily, I only get this one from English majors. Nobody else has ever heard of the debate, which I consider a good thing. Because it’s a total red herring.

There is no actual debate. The answer is not in question.

And it makes complete sense.

Fiction

In fiction, we put a comma after every item in a list.

Except, of course, for the last item, which gets whatever punctuation belongs at the end of that particular list.

Angela ate a chocolate bunny, a chocolate heart, a chocolate rose, and a chocolate elephant! In that order.

See? Simple.
Non-fiction

In non-fiction, we put a comma after every item in a list except the penultimate item.

And except, of course, for the last item, which, again, gets whatever punctuation belongs at the end of that particular list.

In other news today, Angela Lansbury ate a chocolate bunny, a chocolate heart, a chocolate rose and a chocolate elephant. According Lansbury, she ate them in that order.

See? Couldn’t be easier to remember.

The issue isn’t a matter of editorial style or even idiomatic distinction between American and British English.

The issue is fiction versus non-fiction.

And the only reason the question exists at all is the journalistic necessity—which has created so very many of the questions of grammar that seem to plague English teachers and their unwitting accomplices—to compress space.

Journalists are always in need of space on the page. So they make up little rules for themselves like dropping commas and other stuff in order to squeeze more words into smaller space.

I wish I could say this is because journalists simply have that much news to report.

But I’m afraid it’s more likely because they simply have that great a need to compress the news to make room for more advertising.

C’est le vie.

And now you know!

NOTE: The other issue is the complication of all this by using different terms for this type of comma usage: serial and Oxford. I was taught they were terms for the opposite types. However, the naming convention is not in the slightest bit universal—like so very much of our grammatical shenanigans—which is why I don’t use the names in discussing the issue.

NEXT WEEK: That vs. Which

The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .demystifies essential aspects of craft while paying homage to the art.”—Millicent Dillon, five time O. Henry Award winner and PEN/Faulkner nominee

“Teeming with gold. . .makes you love being a writer because you belong to the special club that gets to read this book.”—KM Weiland, author of Outlining Your Novel

The Art and Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“This book changed my life.”—Stu Wakefield, Kindle #1 best-selling author of Body of Water and Memory of Water

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“As much a gift to writers as an indispensible resource. . .in a never-done-before manner that inspires while it teaches. Highly recommended.”—Larry Brooks, author of four bestselling thrillers and Story Engineering

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

Grammar Expose: Third-Person Singular Pronoun

Victoria — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 07:34:59 +0000

This month we’re going to tackle a few die-hard grammar questions in what I like to consider a grammar expose.

June should be an exciting month, right? So let’s make it exciting.

Here’s an issue that should probably have been laid to rest decades ago, but it does still crop up occasionally, so I’m going to give you all a little refresher course in something that all we English-speaking writers stumble over sooner or later:

Third-Person Singular Pronoun

And I’m going to do it by sending you on over to the post I wrote about it a couple of years ago—which turned out to be a pretty popular post.

Like I said: we all stumble over it sooner or later.

NEXT WEEK on Grammar Expose: Serial vs. Oxford Comma

THE WEEK AFTER on Grammar Expose: That vs. Which

The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .demystifies essential aspects of craft while paying homage to the art.”—Millicent Dillon, five time O. Henry Award winner and PEN/Faulkner nominee

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

1 Secret Trick to Becoming a Genius Writer in One Day

Victoria — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 07:29:58 +0000

Now, as far as genius, you think I’m going to say, “Shut up and write,” don’t you? But unfortunately that won’t make you a genius. It won’t even make you a writer. That will only make you a scribbler, which isn’t a bad thing to be, at all. . .but it’s not the same thing. We’ve talked about 2 Tricks for Breaking Writer’s Block in One Day. And 3 Tricks for Increasing Tension in One Day. And 4 Tricks for Improving Your Fiction in One Day.

So now I’ll reveal the real secret to becoming a genius, particularly a genius writer. Pay close attention.

Realize what exactly genius is

What do you mean by, “becoming a genius”?

Do you mean, “having extraordinary intelligence granted to me without me lifting a pinky”?

Do you mean, “being recognized by the smartest people on earth”?

Do you mean, “relishing every spec of living I possibly can in the few fleeting years granted to me on this planet—years I see flashing past me more and more quickly the older I get—because, baby, we’re none of us getting any younger”?
- Extraordinary intelligence. . .
  
  . . .doesn’t come to anyone without them lifting a pinky.
  
  Extraordinary intelligence is developed by the constant creative use of the the brain. How much of your time do you spend using your brain creatively—developing your skills with logic and critical analysis of the things that truly matter to you, using all five senses to perceive your moment-by-moment experience of life to the fullest capacity, asking not just, “What do I think or believe or feel?” but, “What do I think and believe and feel that I would never have guessed about myself?”
  
  Do you have the courage to face your disowned self? Honestly, truly face it?
  
  Eight hours of that will ratchet your genius for human understanding—the core of all storytelling—through the ceiling.
- Being recognized by the smartest people on earth. . .
  
  . . .involves being seen by them.
  
  And on an increasingly crowded planet, that means not getting the attention of those recognized in the media—how smart could Charlie Sheen be anyway?—but finding the unrecognized geniuses who walk among us every day and devoting yourself to learning what they know. Apprenticing yourself to them. Earning their recognition.
  
  Would Einstein have been as smart if nobody had ever heard of him? Yes. Was Franz Kafka a great literary and philosophical genius even though he died before anyone ever found out? Yes.
  
  Who can you identify in your life right now who’s one of the smartest people on earth?
  
  Eight hours of listening at their knee will teach you the secret uniqueness—the core of all memorable storytelling—of their genius.
- Relishing every spec of living you possibly can. . .
  
  . . .in the fleeting years granted you starts right now.
  
  Let me tell you a story, okay?
  
  My husband and I spent this weekend working on our house, even though we burned ourselves out on it so badly when we built it four years ago that we’re still content to live with subfloor on the stairs and big, gaping holes for lag bolts in the hall floor and cracks you can see light through where there’s supposed to be trim.
  
  We really hate working on the house.
  
  So late yesterday we were in the attic, me on the stairs exhausted from moving stacks of flooring, him on his knees cutting a piece of wood. He glanced up and said, “Are you okay?” and I said, “I’m just thinking. It looks like I’m in pain when I do that, I know.”
  
  And we started laughing.
  
  In that instant I knew what we’ll remember when we’re old and sick and frail and, maybe, there’s only one of us left alone in this world. (I spent a lot of time with my grandfather after my grandmother died. I know what it’s going to be like.) We’re not going to care that we were working on the house even though we hate working on the house, or that we were exhausted and bruised and filthy, thinking about bills and work and mortgages and the difficulties of raising a teen.
  
  We’re going to long with every fiber of our being to be back in that over-heated attic together at the end of that long, hard Sunday. . .laughing.
  
  And knowing that—knowing you’re already living the life you long for with all your heart—you better believe. . .that’s genius.

How close are you to being a genius right now?

The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .demystifies essential aspects of craft while paying homage to the art.”—Millicent Dillon, five time O. Henry Award winner and PEN/Faulkner nominee

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

4 Tricks for Improving Your Fiction in One Day

Victoria — Mon, 27 May 2013 07:22:34 +0000

We’re talking this month about instantaneous ways to improve craft—because, as Carrie Fisher says, “Instant gratification takes too long.” We’ve talked about 2 Tricks to Breaking Writer’s Block in One Day. And 3 Tricks to Increasing Tension in One Day.

Now let’s talk about how you can use your own life to improve your fiction. . .in one day.

What do you most want?

Protagonists are people who want.

And when you’re talking about characters who want things badly enough to keep readers intrigued for 300 pages, you’d better know those characters inside and out. In fact—you’d better know them as well as you know yourself.

Know what drives you through life. That’s the best drive to give your protagonists.

Most of the great writers wrote the same character over and over again under different names, in different plots, throughout their lives. Those particular characters have the motivations those particular writers understand. Deeply. Profoundly. In the magnificent, complex manner necessary to write about it.

Raymond Chandler wrote a whole series of characters exactly like Phillip Marlowe before he finally settled on the name, career, and face of Marlowe.
Why can’t you have it?

What the hell is wrong with you?

That’s what the hell is wrong with your protagonist.

And don’t mistake this to mean it’s something outside of you. Of course you’re strapped for cash, tied to a job, inevitably tethered to the need to make a living. But your need to survive lives inside you. And that’s an excellent need to impose upon a protagonist.

You’re also desperate for love and understanding, lonely, frustrated, trapped alone in a tormented little skull without the skills or confidence to survive what you have to do just to survive. That’s also all going on inside you. Another excellent need.

Why do you think so many books are built around protagonists torn between a fight to stay alive and the need to be loved?

Even Pride and Prejudice—with Austen’s pivotal exploration of entailment and the precarious futures of disinherited young gentlewomen—is about nothing but love and survival.
How are you buying into this?

Make no mistake about it: you are.

And that’s what makes you interesting. Otherwise, you’re just a blob.

That’s what makes your protagonist interesting, too. Internal conflict. How are they buying into their own nightmare? What inside them keeps them strung up on their own self-made scaffold? What makes them kick? What makes them kick over the chair?

If you’re not interested enough in human nature to sink to this level of self-examination, to bare your chest to the elements, to admit to this severe of self-sabotage (and you have it—we all do), you’re simply not tough enough to write fiction.

Emily Bronte exposed her guts in Wuthering Heights. Self-loathing doesn’t get any more fascinating than that.
What would force you to choose?

Because eventually you’re going to choose.

In your life. And in your fiction.

This is what readers read for: what do you choose when you can’t have it both ways? How do you make sense of a life that is, in the final hour, senseless?

Everyone reads to learn how life makes sense. You’re here to drag the ultimate nightmare—what if life doesn’t make sense?—out into the light and reveal it for what it really is: angel or devil, creation or destruction, incandescent hope or crippling despair.

Nothing less.

NEXT WEEK: 1 Secret Trick to Becoming a Genius Writer in One Day

The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .demystifies essential aspects of craft while paying homage to the art.”—Millicent Dillon, five time O. Henry Award winner and PEN/Faulkner nominee

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

3 Tricks to Increasing Tension in One Day

Victoria — Mon, 20 May 2013 07:23:49 +0000

I love the idea that so much of learning to write well starts the instant you learn it. What a fabulous craft! Last week we learned 2 Tricks for Breaking Writer’s Block in One Day. Now for the rest of the month we’ll be talking about other tricks that also work in one day.

We’re always hearing about how we need to increase the tension in our stories, how we need to get ahold of the reader by the lapels and never let go.

But how?

Curiosity

Don’t answer your questions the minute you ask them.

Give the reader time to wonder. Who is that suspicious character? Why are they involved with your protagonist? Why is your protagonist reacting the way they’re reacting?

You’re constructing a puzzle, and the reader keeps turning pages to collect the clues and discover whether or not they’ve solved it correctly.

Patricia Highsmith began The Talented Mr. Ripley—about a man who drifts into murder for the sake of wealth and a new identity—with a scene in which Tom Ripley scurries down a busy street escaping in great distress a man obviously following him, who Tom believes is a police officer sent to bust him for one of his confidence tricks. He’s not from the police, it turns out. In fact he doesn’t mean Tom harm at all. He’s just desperate to offer Tom the opportunity of a lifetime.
Cutting

Don’t let your final draft ramble.

Far too many aspiring writers write and write and write and forget to revise out the standard 75%. Go ahead and write everything you can discover about any given scene, but then go back later and cut everything you possibly can—almost all exposition, every possible dialog tag (especially internal dialog), every single extraneous scrap (choose one action instead of two or three, one line of dialog instead of back-&-forth, one pivotal descriptive detail). Cut scenes. Cut paragraphs. Cut sentences, phrases, individual words. Trim it down to the lean, mean bones.

James M. Cain packed so much into so few, simple words that his classic novels The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity read like explosions.
Contradiction

Don’t let your stories lie flat.

Toss them like hot potatoes from one plotline to another. Now we’re startled. Now we’re entranced! Now we’re scared. Now we’re intrigued! Now we’re freaked out of our seats. Now we’re flying high. . .

Zane Grey, the granddaddy of all great adventure stories—from which sprang such modern post-apocalyptic blockbusters as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road—wove double plotlines through his novels so thickly the reader is forced to let go the reins early on, so they wind up airborne without either wings or parachute by the end of the Hook.

And that’s where you want your reader: in the air, out of control, completely possessed by an ungovernable urge to discover what on earth your story is all about.

NEXT WEEK: 4 Tricks for Improving Your Fiction in One Day

FINALLY: 1 Secret Trick to Becoming a Genius Writer in One Day

The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .demystifies essential aspects of craft while paying homage to the art.”—Millicent Dillon, five time O. Henry Award winner and PEN/Faulkner nominee

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

2 Tricks for Breaking Writer’s Block in One Day

Victoria — Mon, 13 May 2013 07:16:08 +0000

We’re going to spend this month talking about tricks of the trade that work in one day. There are a lot of them, and with all of us struggling to juggle work, family, social life, and writing (plus all that time we wind up paying attention to marketers to whom we don’t even want to pay attention). . .we need ‘em.

This is all because last week I ran into to a friend I hadn’t seen in awhile who’s writing a memoir. I asked her how things were going. We talked a bit about a time a couple of years when she’d told me she was having a lot of trouble with it—she couldn’t make herself write a particular incident she needed to write.

She’d asked me if I had any advice: did she need a class? a group? a coach?

Now, I do this kind of work with writers all the time, helping them write what they need to write when they need to write it, so, yeah, I had some advice for her.

And I’ll give it to you too, in case you’re ever up against a similar block.

Groups and classes can help if all you need is a little peer pressure to get yourself in gear, but they can make it worse if you’re really struggling with an emotional block and find yourself embarrassed to be unable to break through, especially in front of others. So before you invest in anything try these two tricks:

Permission

Give yourself permission to pause and write about this issue whenever it strikes you, even if it’s only a line or two between work projects that you can go back to and develop later.
Details

Whenever you do have a chunk of time in which you’d like to write, focus first on recording some concrete, neutral, unrelated details—what you had for lunch, the view from where you’re sitting, some conversation you had recently—to kind of grease the writing wheels so the words will come out of you more easily.

Frequently it’s the effort to make two transitions at once (the transition into writing mode plus the transition into a safe emotional space) that can cause this kind of writer’s block, and it helps to take them one at a time.

Remember: you’re writing what you write not to bind yourself ever-more tightly in your painful emotional paralysis, but to free yourself so you can live this one life you get as fully as humanly possible.

NEXT WEEK: 3 Tricks for Increasing the Tension in Your Story in One Day

THE WEEK AFTER: 4 Tricks for Improving Your Fiction in One Day

FINALLY: 1 Secret Trick to Becoming a Genius Writer in One Day

The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .demystifies essential aspects of craft while paying homage to the art.”—Millicent Dillon, five time O. Henry Award winner and PEN/Faulkner nominee

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

How to Revise Wrong, in 3 Easy Steps

Victoria — Mon, 06 May 2013 07:27:11 +0000

And now that we’ve plotted wrong, characterized wrong, and written wrong. . .let’s talk about how to sit down with that baby and revise it wrong.

Be obsessed with letting your language ‘breathe’

This is code for: “Be unwilling to revise anything but inexcusable errors and typos.” This is because you must trust, you must trust in the process (didn’t your Discount Life Coach tell you that only last week?), you must understand that those words in that order in those sentences came out of you by Divine Inspiration and cannot be tampered with without losing their ‘freshness’ and ’spark.’

‘Freshness’ and ’spark’ being code for: “Accidentally getting it right.” Because you don’t actually have a clue what you’re doing.

Experience? Practice? Education? Time-tested techniques for shaping, honing, polishing written language? What do you think you are, a buffing wheel?

Don’t waste your time on rewriting stuff you’ve already written, whatever you do. Think about how many more books you could publish if you stopped worrying about how the last one turned out and got busy on the next. You’d be a millionaire in no time!

This is why so many people are self-publishing books these days with titles like God Wants You to Write.

Look for guidance only from peers on unsupervised critique forums

Because, as we all know, money always flows toward the writer. So be sure to get everything you need to become a successful author for nothing, as a fool and their money are soon parted.

At least you hope so. After all, you’re counting on lots and lots of fools out there with lots and lots of money to buy this book you’re accidentally writing in spite of yourself.

Be correct that your peers have little to teach you

Well, it’s true.

Which is why it’s so easy to dismiss them as callow unbelievers if they actually suggest revisions. Or—heaven forbid—going back to the drawingboard.

The problem is that your peers don’t know any more about this work than you do. So their opinions, no matter how well-meaning, can’t possibly be any more than amateurs’ surface reactions to a deep, complex, multifaceted craft no one has ever completely mastered before they died. Not even Stieg Larsson.

The truth is that you’re probably an unrecognized genius—that’s why your critiquers misunderstand you. I mean, what expertise are they going to use to recognize you with? They’re a bunch of amateurs.

Except the ones who are even more amateur than you are, of course. Those guys love you!

You are the only real authority on your own work, unlike all those OCD nitpickers who style themselves ‘experts.’ (Good thing publishers have unloaded most of them.) Publishers are a big, shiny store window. You are a customer.

And the customer is always right.

I only know this stuff because I’ve been there.

The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .demystifies essential aspects of craft while paying homage to the art.”—Millicent Dillon, five time O. Henry Award winner and PEN/Faulkner nominee

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

How to Write Wrong, in 3 Easy Steps

Victoria — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 07:22:39 +0000

Last week we learned how to characterize wrong. The week before that we learned how to plot wrong.

And today I’m going to teach you how to cripple your book so that—even if your plot is maximum overdrive and your characterization nothing short of brilliant—no one in the industry will touch it with a ten-foot pole.

So let’s get busy and write wrong:

Model your writing on crap

If the single best way to learn to write well is to study the literary canon with enormous care and all the intelligence you can muster to learn the techniques of the greats. . .that makes the single best way to learn to write wrong reading nothing but cheap modern crap and telling yourself, ‘If they can get away with that, I can get away with anything.’

Because writing is all about ‘what you can get away with,’ isn’t it? Heaven forbid it should be a highly-developed craft with a long and illustrious history of hard work, dedication, and sometimes real genius behind it.

It’s a slot machine!

Garbage in, garbage out.

Believe the uber-marketing hypesters who tell you, “The writing doesn’t matter”

So don’t waste your time actually learning how to write, people. The writing doesn’t matter. Throw your random, half-baked ideas into unpolished words—your ideas, your brilliant ideas that no one, not even the geniuses in the history of literature, ever, ever, ever thought of before—and shove them PDQ down the Golden Query Chute. And that deafening silence you get in reply? That just means they’re too busy shuffling through the mountains of shlock everyone else who doesn’t care about the writing keeps shoveling through their mail slots—they can’t recognize natural talent anymore when they see it.

It’s the era of entitlement! And you’re entitled to be rich and famous.

Don’t pause to learn how to write. You don’t have time. (Why not? I don’t know. But you don’t.) Just keep on shoveling. Someone’s bound to be young, inexperienced, and/or desperate enough to take you on. And after that—whoa!—it’s Easy Street.

Move over, J.K. Rowling.

Be in a hurry to get published

And this is why it’s best to read only stuff being shoveled as fast as possible through the chute right now, this minute—because that will show you what sells.

No, you don’t have a famous name or a devoted following of hundreds of thousands or insider knowledge of how writing and modern publishing work, like the best sellers who—for business reasons of their own—often no longer have the time to polish their work properly before they publish it.

But you’re going to skip right over that little detail. What they do you can do.

Without their famous name. Or their reputation. Or their understanding of the craft and industry. Or their publisher. Or their agent. Or their mega-numbers of readers. I guess. . .

So, when in doubt, be sure to ramble on for pages in exposition, explaining your story in vague abstractions for that dimwit you expect to buy it (a fool and their money, yesirree), substitute noises you make up yourself for dialog (“Waaaghghghgh! Nngngng. Uh, dunno, duncare”), brand names for telling details (doesn’t everyone know brand names? I mean, we’re all glued to our shopping malls and TV commercials together, right?), and the verb ‘grab’ for every action you possibly can (“She grabbed the door, ran in the house and grabbed her keys, grabbed a Diet Coke from the fridge, and as she ran out he jumped out from behind the door and grabbed her”).

Your reader will get the general idea. Because these days readers don’t read books carefully, anyway, only buy them for the famous names on the covers (although you did, you admit, skip over that little detail). And since they’re reading standing in line to buy cheap plastic crap they don’t need, anyway, that’s all they care about.

Literature? It’s the twenty-first century, people! We don’t need no stinkin’ literature.

Next week we learn how to revise wrong.

Naturally, none of this helps at all if we don’t know 9 Ways to Find the Time to Write.

Hi, my name is Victoria, and I have written mountains of shlock. But I didn’t publish it—not most of it, anyway—and I’m working to get better now, one day at a time.

UPDATE: Phyllis K. Twombly has added: Neglect Feedback; Ignore Concepts Within One’s Chosen Genre; Don’t Research

The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .demystifies essential aspects of craft while paying homage to the art.”—Millicent Dillon, five time O. Henry Award winner and PEN/Faulkner nominee

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

How to Characterize Wrong, in 3 Easy Steps

Victoria — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 07:10:10 +0000

Last week we learned how to plot wrong. That was fun! Now we all know how to do it so nobody will ever be interested and our stories will never get published, much less read.

Interestingly enough, when I wrote this whole series two years ago it was the post on how to characterize wrong that got all the attention.

So I’m going to send you on over to that original post to find out why.

What you’ll learn over there is something I learned—not by reading lots of books on writing or taking lots of classes or attending a lot of writers workshops or following lots of blogs—but by studying storytelling. Novels. Stories. Ballads.

The real thing.

And I want to remind you: you should be learning the bulk of your craft this way too.

It’s all about the real thing.

Next week we talk about how to write wrong.

And the week after that we talk about how to revise wrong.

Plus, of course, we need 9 Ways to Find the Time to Write.

The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .demystifies essential aspects of craft while paying homage to the art.”—Millicent Dillon, five time O. Henry Award winner and PEN/Faulkner nominee

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

Writer’s Digest:101 Best Websites for Writers

Victoria — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 19:21:14 +0000

I’ve got a logger out there felling big trees around my meadow today—zzzzz, BOOM, instant sunshine!—so I’m just popping in very quickly to let you all know that I heard from Writer’s Digest this morning that my blog has been judged one of the 101 Best Websites for Writers 2013.

I know I’m supposed to thank my mother and my father and all the people who ever taught me about writing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. . .but I’m not going to.

I’m going to thank you.

You guys. You’re the ones who make it worthwhile!

Thank you all!

The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .demystifies essential aspects of craft while paying homage to the art.”—Millicent Dillon, five time O. Henry Award winner and PEN/Faulkner nominee

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop